Monday, March 07, 2011

Small Boat Ocean Voyaging for the Accident-Prone

The world is full of stories of
success, mostly because successful people like to tell of their
victories rather than expound on their defeats. This is self-serving
of them and a loss to the rest of us, because we only learn from
mistakes. The best kind are small, non-fatal mistakes; these are also
the most common. Disastrous, fatal errors are rarely the first ones
to be made, because it usually takes a compounding of errors to give rise to
a fatal situation. And so here is a little object study of a series
of small errors, the problems they caused, and the solutions they
necessitated.

Giving credit where credit is due, let
me say right at the outset that the problems I will examine here are
not entirely of my own making: they were rather carefully set up for
me by the person from whom we bought our boat. I do fault myself for my
(initial) inexperience, my misplaced trust (I trusted that he
knew what he was doing) and my inability to draw a conclusion and act
on it (that the person in question was a dangerous incompetent and
that everything on the boat that he had touched should be
carefully examined, and, in some cases, cast overboard forthwith and
replaced).

I have a plethora of examples to choose
from, but, for the sake of keeping the story short and focused, I
will zero in on just one problem: autohelm mounting. Autopilots (and
other self-steering devices such as windvanes) are essential for
people who make ocean passages single-handed or without much crew. My
crew is my wife; if we were to steer by hand, we'd each have to steer
for 12 hours out of every 24 (which we've done on occasion and did
not enjoy). Needless to say, our tillerpilot is a
favorite piece of equipment: with it, life is easy; without it, life
is hard.

Our boat uses a Simrad Autohelm TP32,
which is an amazing piece of equipment. Along with the GPS and the
VHF radio, these are the only pieces of marine electronics on our
boat, and are carefully chosen for being cheap, reliable, and
indispensable. The boat came with a TP22 (TP32's smaller cousin)
pre-installed by the boat's previous owner, which is where this story
begins.

Simrad TP32 (highly recommended)

Tillerpilots are complicated on the
inside (incorporating a fluxgate compass, a servo motor and a microcontroller) but simple on the outside. Clip them to a socket
mounted in the cockpit and a pin mounted on the tiller, push the
“Auto” button, and the boat will go in a straight line, for days.
There are just three steps to the installation: mount the socket,
mount the pin, and hook it up to 12 Volts. Now, what happens when one buys a
boat where someone has screwed up all three? Answer: amazing
adventure beyond your wildest dreams!

* * *

Having launched Hogfish, our boat, in
Boston, our first voyage was north to Maine. The passage to Portland
was uneventful. The wind was steady and the autohelm performed
admirably. On July 27, 2007 we left Portland around 13:30 and headed
across Casco Bay and up the coast. Around 17:30 the wind picked
up considerably and I took in a reef. Around 18:00 I made a note in
the log:

“18:00: Autohelm busted. Bracket
farigued. No more autohelm.”

The broken bracket was a puny aluminum
alloy stamping. It broke in half as I watched in dismay.

Pin bracket (not serviceable)

“18:16: Worked out a beam reach with
tiller lashed.”

In the intervening 15 minutes, I put
away the now useless tillerpilot and worked out a combination of sail
trim and rudder angle to keep the boat sailing along without being
actively steered. Now, Hogfish is a very good little boat that does
something only some particularly well-designed boats do: it
self-steers. That is, on most points of sail (anything from beam
reach to close on the wind) it does not have to be steered at all to
follow a course. It hunts around a bit, and sometimes a big wave or a
big gust will knock it off course, but mostly it takes care of
itself.

By 23:15 it was blowing half a gale in
the direction of some jagged rocks, which I knew to be lurking
ominously on the horizon. I logged: “At this point, need to
avoid land... New course 124°M
to avoid Manana Island.” I pointed the boat at the open ocean and
played with the tiller lashings and sail trim to keep it on course.
By midnight I was mostly napping in the cockpit. Every 7 minutes a
periodic big wave would wake me up, and I would scan the dark horizon
and adjust sail trim and tiller. By 3:21, based on dead reckoning, we
were close-reaching safely south of Monhegan Island. Around 5:00
the wind died. I fired up the GPS and took a reading: 43°43.97'/69°09.35' which
put us ESE of Monhegan and nowhere near any dirt or rocks.

I measured
the drift: 1 kt to 50°M—a
reasonable direction back toward mainland with sea room on all sides.
Since the wind was dead, “heaving to” was not an option. The
remaining option was “lying ahull,” so I took down the sails,
turned on the anchor light, let the sea do what it will and and went
to sleep for real. I had to sleep on the settee in the cabin,
stiff-arming the centerboard trunk to avoid rollng off, because my
wife and the cat took up all of the V-berth, spread out as far as
possible, to avoid getting rolled over by the big 7-minute waves. The
cat seemed particularly well-anchored to the bedspread, with her paws
outstretched and her claws out.

By dawn we had only drifted a few
miles. It was windless and foggy. We motored to the tiny and
picturesque Isle Au Haut and by 16:00 were at a “rented” mooring
(the rent being a $20 stuffed into a Coke bottle attached to the
mooring buoy) in the island's snug and picture-perfect anchorage.

The
next day I built a new bracket out of scrap using hand tools on
board, and on the 29th we sailed on, to Blue Hill Bay.

Replacement pin bracket (worked fine, eventually)

* * *

This repair stood us in good stead for
quite a while, until the fateful morning of October 27, 2007, when
the pin rocked loose while we were sailing down Long Island Sound at
night, toward New York City. I hand-steered the rest of the way, a good 6
hours of hard work avoiding getting spun around by big following
seas that congregated at the narrow end of the Sound. While at 79th Street Marina I was able to fix the
problem by stacking up some washers (which are rusted in the photo
above because the hardware store on Broadway did not stock stainless steel
hardware). But after that the pin, at least, held through all kinds
of weather.

* * *

All was well with our autohelm hardware
until July 10th of 2008, when we were approaching
Beaufort, North Carolina, having cast off at St. Augustine, Florida
on the 6th. Approaching Cape Hatteras (an evil spot from a
sailing point of view if there ever was one) we were caught up in one
of the outer arms of Hurricane Bertha, which whipped up gale force
winds and 10-12 foot seas. In these conditions, the socket in the
autohelm base worked loose and started rocking. I took all of this in
and made a change of plan: we were going to make it to Beaufort Inlet
running under bare poles and then get a tow through the inlet. This
plan worked well enough, except for one thing: after the tow boat
captain passed me the towing line and I tied it to the Samson post in
the bow of the boat, a huge breaking wave swept through and tumbled
the towing line under the boat, looping it around the rudder, so that
when the tow boat captain throttled up, he put enough force on the
rudder to snap our autopilot in half. Since he was a BoatUS captain,
and I carried BoatUS insurance, BoatUS paid for a replacement
autopilot, giving me a chance to upgrade to a TP32 from a TP22, so
all was well. (While installing the TP32, I couldn't help but notice
that the TP22 was wired up with the dinkiest of wires rather than the
recommended 12-gauge, and this explained its sometimes erratic
performance.)

As an aside, sailing in a hurricane is
probably not everyone's cup of tea. Frankly, I don't care for it very
much myself. It is unsettling to look up at your mast and see water
directly behind it, and it is strange to look at the horizon and see
an ant's eye view of a broccoli patch. Also, I don't much like it
when the wind is strong enough to pick up a neat coil of heavy dock
line right off the deck and string it out into the sea, or when,
while clambering around the deck in a harness, I have to pinch my
nose shut and breathe through pursed lips because otherwise the wind
is strong enough to explode my lungs. At some point we declared the
cabin unsafe because of all the loose cutlery flying around down
there and boarded it off, and my wife sat in the cockpit with me,
holding the cat wrapped in a towel. We were all relatively calm and
self-assured, but after it was all over and we were safely tied up at
Beaufort Docks, the cat gave me the weirdest look I ever got from a
cat; a look that said something like “What in the wild world of
sports was all that about?” Enough said; sailing through a
hurricane is not a recommended procedure as far as I am concerned.

While at Beaufort Docks I drilled a new
hole for the autohelm socket and epoxied it it in place.

Socket base (with socket relocated)

In the
process, I discovered two things: first, the original socket position
was misaligned, causing the autohelm to “hunt around” to
compensate for being rotated left while trying to turn right and vice
versa, indicating that whosoever installed it was geometrically
challenged. Secondly, what looked like a solid piece of wood used to
mount the socket turned out to be masonite, which
is an environmentally friendly product invented by one Mr. Mason and
made by pressing together wood chips without any sort of glue. (The
autohelm manufacturer's instructions specified hardwood.) I
compensated for the weakness of this material by oversizing the hole
and slathering it with epoxy. It held for as long as it had to.

While
hauled out for repairs in East Boston during the winter of 2009-2010
I finally had a chance to address the problem of autohelm mounting
once and for all. The base now consists of two pieces of oak
lag-bolted and glued together, mounted to the cockpit seat using
through-bolts.

The final version (no issues at all)

The pin is now pounded into a carved piece of oak that
is secured to the tiller by a U-bolt bolted through the rudder to a
backing plate.

The final version (no issues at all)

All of the above are coated with epoxy and painted
with two-part polyurethane primer, and a couple of coats of two-part
polyurethane paint. I suspect that this combination will outlast many
things, including me and the boat.

It's that kind of ingenuity and adaptability that saw us through the Ice Age...What has been the lesson learned for living on a small boat in a postpeak oil future without handy parts stores, GPS (as satellites fail), autopilots, etc? Or are you pretty sure all that will remain available for decades to come?

Cats do well aboard sailboats. This is the way they have taken over the world. I have never heard of a cat flinging itself overboard. Ours doesn't go on deck in anything but a dead calm.

Sailboats and ocean sailing predate industry, and for every problem there is a pre-industrial fallback solution or two or three using more traditional methods. The problem is that the number of people who have the traditional skills is vanishingly small.

I have an excellent book of knots, called "The Ashley Book of Knots" by Clifford W. Ashley, ISBN: 0-385-04025-3, that I have been trying to study and learn from. A lot of interesting pre-industrial knots, but as for pre-industrial navigation... I guess the trick is to find someone who knows and learn from them. I would imagine the Polynesians know some good tips.

That sounds like a damn useful device. It's not clear to me from the photo how it functions mechanically - viz., how it physically steers the boat - but I bet the sailors of yore wished they had something of the kind. I notice it has a "tack" command with directional arrows. Can you actually *program* it to tack, or does that require a sailor's personal attention? Having performed this maneuver a few times long ago I would have thought the latter.

Your end-state solution looks very solid, what with all the bolts. Personally I wouldn't count on the epoxy-glued version to hold indefinitely under stress, but then I'm not an engineer so I could be mistaken.

I had to look up what a windvane is. I suppose they could have made such a mechanical self-steering device in olden times, but Wikipedia (infallible source of all truth and wisdom) says they weren't developed until modern days. Those ancient mariners with small crews must have been really sleep deprived.

Your description of the hurricane takes some of the gloss off my boyhood fantasies of adventurous sailing voyages, especially when you mention the possibility of exploded lungs. I suppose anything that gives one an unusual degree of freedom and independence involves some risk.

Do either of you have navigational skills in case GPS were to become unavailable, as for instance in event of a war or "national emergency," cooked-up or genuine?

Hi Dmitry,It's always fun to read about other people's mishaps, especially when the storyteller has a gift of self-effacing humor - must be your Russian roots, I presume.Though, I should add, that the circumstances under which you experienced them are all but life-threatening.What I enjoyed especially, was your completely original description of a choppy sea-scape: "an ant's eye view of a broccoli patch". Great eco-imaging!Ronald

I had a "moment" with one of those...admittedly probably due to my unfamiliarity with it's capabilities.

While VERY useful for keeping headed into wind for a sail-change, I bought a boat that came with one that decided to short out at about 3am in pretty wild seas 30 miles off-shore...taking my batteries with it.

Sheet-to-tiller FTW! (or a windvane - if you have either a LOT of money, or enough time to play building your own...)

re. ancient navigation - take a look at "the Last Navigator", by Steve Thomas. Essentially it's all about time spent paying CLOSE attention to the environment (rather than screens).

That was a very nice post. I have myself been thinking rather seriously about getting a boat to live (and travel) once I get back to Europe. In order to get through a hurricane as you mentioned, what minimal size should the boat have?

People have ridden out hurricanes in 28-footers. There are all sorts of features that have nothing to do with size, too many to list here. But if you think about it, a walnut can survive a hurricane, and it's quite small. On the other hand, very large ships have been destroyed by rogue waves because they were designed with a maximum wave size in mind, and there is no such thing, really. Get a boat you can afford and can handle and maintain and improve by yourself.

A lovely tale, K. Even the newer boats I've sailed always seem to have something amiss that requires a jerry rig underway -- and nothing pleases me more than the feeling of spontaneous ingenuity. (It also impresses the wife, so there's that, too.)

If you can find a copy, a great book for pathfinding and navigation using the natural world. Been re-reading it this week: Nature Is Your Guide: How to Find Your Way on Land and Sea by Observing Nature by Harold Gatty and J. H. Doolittle (Mar 29, 1979)The author was both a marine and aviation navigator through WWII, and also learned techniques from indigenous peoples.For marine navigation it covers the stars, sun and moon, habits of sea birds, directions from waves and swells, the color of the sea, etc.